11/30/2009

PR Week reports that the Central Office of Information (COI) has issued a 'five-step' guide for behaviour change campaigns. This despite pages of academic text attesting to the difficulty and complexity of achieving behavioural change.

I would like to see the evidence that the COI's behavioural change campaigns have actually realised real changes in peoples lives before I followed their prescriptive advice. It would also be good to see evidence that the guidelines' authors had consulted behavioural change experts and academics before publishing their advice. Evidence-base anyone?!

11/26/2009

Just had a meeting with Dorota, one of my PR student reps. She is conducting a survey on behalf into what students expect from a PR degree. Please do all get involved and share your views - I'm looking forward to reading the results and feeding them into the course review that I doing at the moment. For more information, contact Dorota Deptula through the Uni email system.

11/25/2009

Social networking is big news - if you're not tweeting, posting status updates on facebook or linking up on Linked In, you're in the minority these days. So it's no surprise that PRO's have a social network all of their own! PR Open Mic is a great site for those working in, studying or researching the PR industry and a 'must have' site for all PR students!

As far as I know, academia (www.academia.edu) and PR are the only professions with specialist social networking sites - anyone know of any others?

I had coffee with my lovely friend, Emma, earlier. She's head of PR for the University and she and another good colleague, Vickie Woodward, edit the University magazine, WLV Dialogue, which won the Silver Award for the Best Newspaper or Magazine at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Midlands PRide Awards last week.

This is a great accolade for them both as they only launched it last year and it goes from strength to strength. Great news for both of them and fully deserved in my opinion!

The research project that I have been undertaking with Insignia Communications is almost complete now and we have just signed off the final version of the report. It's looking good and I'm pleased with it. An assault on the media is planned shortly so watch this space for more information.

I've really enjoyed working on it and I think our findings are fascinating but I'm keen to do a more in-depth social semiotic analysis of the data now - I think there are richer and more nuanced findings to be made with this kind of analysis, so I'm hoping to get time to make a start on this after Christmas.

In the meantime, there is definitely enough material here for a level one class on media spokespeople and I'm looking forward to giving that next semester.

Hi. This is my first post so I guess I should provide a bit of background. I'm a senior lecturer in public relations at the University of Wolverhampton and I'm hoping that this blog will serve as a means of sharing some of my thoughts and ideas with my students and other like-minded people!

In addition to teaching, I am completing my PhD at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. My research interests are mainly in the area of professionalism in public relations, although I'm also interested in health and risk communications and have just completed a research project with Insignia Communiations on the elements of a good interview in the context of the swine flu outbreak.

My University is in the middle of redesigning the curriculum so that is a current preoccupation of mine. I'm responsible for the redesign of the undergraduate degree in public relations and I want to make sure that I'm getting it right so I'm open to suggestions and comments from students and those of you in the PR industry!

I will mostly write about these interests and other academic and PR related issues that interest or vex me. Although I suspect my love of latin american dancing and my kids will make it on here from time to time too!